Found you in Fiction

Found you in Fiction

I kept searching for stories to escape, until one quietly led me back to it.

I genuinely think the universe and I have some sort of unspoken grudge against each other. Every now and then, it reminds me that I was never holding the strings — it was. I was only ever the puppet, convinced I had a choice in where the story would go.

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I lived almost entirely inside stories. Fantasy, fiction, anything that let me believe there was more to the world than the one in front of me. If a teacher asked what I loved, my answer arrived before the question had finished. Reading. Writing. Films. Fantasy, especially — the impossible kinds, where people survived because the author loved them enough to let them. My friends used to come to me for their next read, movie marathons, and often ask what story would stay with them after the credits rolled. I always had an answer.

That was before I met him.

No novel had prepared me for how ordinary the beginning would seem, nor how completely it would alter the architecture of my life. Loving him felt strangely familiar, as though I had wandered into a book I had somehow already memorized. Every conversation carried the weight of a scene. Every silence felt intentional. We built a language so quiet it convinced me intimacy was simply another word for destiny.

Until it wasn’t.

Somewhere between loving him and trying not to lose him, I misplaced myself. I became unfamiliar to the person I used to be.

I would pause my favorite movies just to check if he had finally replied. I abandoned plot twists halfway through because I was too busy refreshing his social media, hoping for an update that had nothing to do with me. Sometimes I’d close my laptop before the opening act was even over because I could feel our conversation dying, and somehow that felt more urgent than any story on the screen.

That was the moment I stopped being the main character in my own life. It is a peculiar grief to discover that the life you stopped living kept moving without you.

He saw what we had become — how we had ruined each other in all the wrong ways — and he ended it. I hated him for that. I hated him with the desperation reserved only for people who once knew your pulse by memory. I hated how I spent days weaving us back together while he quietly accepted that some things are kinder left in disconnected threads.

There is something almost holy in the violence of hearing someone who once loved you slowly return you to the rest of the world — to watch yourself become everyone else in the eyes that once chose only you.

I thought time would make me unfamiliar to him.

I didn’t realize it would also make me unfamiliar to myself.

So I returned to the places where I had once lived before love borrowed my name. I started buying books again. I let films play until the credits. I tried to remember the girl who loved stories before she confused one for her own life.

The books I ordered arrived today.

Strangely, I had never read the synopsis of one of them. I always do. Almost religiously. I like knowing what waits for me before I begin.

I opened it, skimmed the first few pages, without asking permission from the story.

His name was there.

Not one that appears often. Not one you accidentally overlook. His name, printed with the same indifferent ink as every other word, as if the universe had not just reached across years to place it in front of me again.

I kept reading despite myself.

The more the pages turned, the more the story borrowed pieces of ours. Not perfectly. Stories never imitate reality that honestly. But closely enough that memory began reading beside me.

My organs felt as though they were dropping onto the cold tiles of my bedroom floor as I kept reading.

I couldn’t keep going.

I closed the book and placed it on the highest shelf I could reach, high enough that maybe, eventually, I would stop discovering him every time I looked in that direction.

But I couldn’t stop wondering.

How does a name so uniquely his end up printed in a book that seems to know us?

Perhaps coincidence is only another genre people invent to make fate easier to survive.

Or perhaps the universe, after all this time, is still writing us into the margins of each other’s lives, long after we’ve stopped believing we’re part of the same story.

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